


this is what it feels like

by alchemystique



Category: Jurassic World (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-20
Updated: 2015-06-20
Packaged: 2018-04-05 05:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4168380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemystique/pseuds/alchemystique
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath, Owen tries to find his place in the world. He suddenly has a lot of sympathy for Indominous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is what it feels like

“I can’t believe you’re considering this,” she tells him a he looks over the contracts for the third time, and he shrugs. 

“Ian Malcolm wrote a book, Grant did that Rolling Stone article. Hell, even the paleobotanist got in on the action, Claire. Besides. They tell me I have a face for television.” He pauses, glances at her over the top of his paper. “I’m pretty sure that’s an insult.”

She rolls her eyes, unwilling, as usual, to fluff up his ego any more. “Why, though? It’s not like you need more notoriety. Or want it.” 

“Claire. Don’t mistake my appreciation of your big house and your way too healthy food, but I’m homeless, and apparently telling your employer to go fuck themselves makes your paychecks stop coming in, so... if you don’t want me camping out in your living room for the next few years while I attempt to find my marketable skills, you should maybe think about the fact that they want to pay me twenty grand to sit across from Brokaw and answer dumbed down questions for a few hours.”

“Dumbed down?” she asks, a bit incredulously, and Owen has to fight a frown. 

“I have three degrees, thank you very much.”

“Maybe if you’d just stuck with one they wouldn’t want to dumb down your questions.”

“I feel like you’re taking some misplaced aggression out on me.”

“I feel like you spend too much time with your therapist.”

He’d gone to the therapist the first time because Barry had told him it helped. It didn’t - but he kept going, because Masrani was paying for it and it killed an hour twice a week, distracted him from the fact that his life was pretty much in shambles and the only thing holding it together was a woman who, until a few weeks ago, he was pretty sure couldn’t stand him. 

His savings is tied up in InGen lawsuits, his bungalow and ninety percent of his belongings are on an island he wouldn’t go back to even if he could, and despite the fact that he and Claire seem to actually be getting along for the longest period of time he can remember since he met her, they’re in a weird place where he sleeps in her spare room and sometimes Skypes with her nephews, and she occasionally slips out of her room at three in the morning when he’s staring at her dark ceiling and slides into the circle of his arms. Neither one of them sleeps, much, anymore.

They don’t talk about it. He gets it, he does - she’s drowning in litigation and condolences and interviews with every goddamn news company on the planet, toeing the company line while the world lauds her as some heroic figure and she pretends she doesn’t hate herself a little bit. She goes to a therapist of her own and comes back agitated and snappy, and he plays video games in his boxers all day long. 

They’re works in progress, and tackling the ‘what are we’ question seems kind of ridiculous. But the first time he’d mentioned the fact that one of his Navy buddies had offered up his spare bedroom she’d looked like she might have a panic attack, so he’s okay with this, for now. 

Even if it’s fucking weird as hell.

“You just don’t want me psychoanalyzing you.”

“I’d prefer you didn’t, no.”

He slides the contracts across to her, and she quirks an eyebrow at him. “Just look it over, would you? I really don’t feel like hiring a lawyer but I’d really enjoy not signing a contract with loopholes.” Like the fine print on his job offer that tied up his assets in a dinosaur disaster relief fund. Something like that.

“I’m not a lawyer, Owen.”

“Yeah, but you’re probably pretty good at spotting a hidden hoodwink.” 

She rolls her eyes but reads them over anyway, and instead of turning on the tv or wandering the halls of her house, he reaches for the bare feet that are propped next to his thigh on the couch, pulling her forward a bit to set them in his lap. 

She moans, low and soft in her throat, when he digs his thumb into the arch of her foot, and the sound goes straight to his groin. He ignores it, just like usual, and pretends this is normal. Just two pals, sharing a house, helping each other to recover after a traumatic experience. Totally normal.

\------

She comes home the night after his disaster of an interview goes public, kicking her heels off so distractedly that one goes flying off down the hall. He tilts his head from the laptop he’s been staring at for the last hour, watching her come around the corner, already shrugging out of her blazer. She tosses it over a chaise chair and Owen takes that moment to assume she’s had a mental break. This is the least tidy he’s ever seen her, but she doesn’t even bother to walk around the edge of the couch, just clambers over the back and plops herself down next to him, the bag in her arms crinkling as she sets it aside.

The bottle in her hand clinks against the coffee table as she sets it down, and she doesn’t say a word as she works at unscrewing the cap. “What is going on?”

She shoots him a wry smile as she leans back to reach for two tumblers on the table behind them. “We’re celebrating.”

“Okay great.” He eyes her carefully. “What are we celebrating?”

“I quit.” She tilts her head towards him smiling, like she’s fucking proud, and Owen snorts.

“What, your diet?” He pays an honorary nod to her liquor of choice. Tequila. 

“My job.They were talking about risk assessment and the time frame for reopen and how we were going to handle your interview and I just... I just got up and left. In the middle of the meeting.”

“You...didn’t say anything? You just left?”

“Not until Anderson followed me out. He told me to take some mental health time and I told him to suck a fat one.”

Owen guffaws, completely unready for the words out of her mouth, god he hopes it sounded better the first time, because she really needs to work on her indignant insults. But she seems... relaxed, for the first time since they left the island, and there’s something really fucking adorable about the way she curls one leg up under her as she grins at him. “A whole world of corporate jargon and you told him to suck a dick. I gotta say, I’m impressed.”

She preens, and he has to resist the urge to lean forward and kiss her. It’s weird, the things that happen to his brain when she surprises him. He should probably get that checked out. 

“So, we’re, what, just drinking straight tequila until we pass out on the couch together? Claire, are you trying to take advantage of me in my delicate condition?”

She rolls her eyes again, leaning forward to grab the paper bag she’d set aside. Limes and a little plastic salt shaker come tumbling out, and her smile is warm and happy and Owen already feels drunk. “I do know how to drink, Mr. Grady.”

“We’ll see about that,” he mutters as he leans across her for one of the limes, digging in his pocket for the switchblade he keeps there and nearly missing the sharp intake of breath as he presses his shoulder into her. 

She doesn’t even complain about how unsanitary his knife must be as he slices wedges, just watches the muscles in his arm as he works. He’s half tempted to drop all pretense and just lay her out on the couch right now. 

\------

“I’ve never...been skydiving.”

After the first three shots they’d decided to slow down, a bit, pausing to scrounge through her kitchen for a margarita mix Owen doesn’t actually believe she has until she’s doing a little triumphant dance as she holds it up for him to see. 

Somehow they’d ended up playing drinking games, sprawled out on the floor in front of her fireplace. Claire takes a drink from her mug, and Owen laughs as he pictures her, miss prim and uptight, jumping out of a plane. “I puked on my instructor and then cried until we landed. One of the sisters dared me to do it. If you hadn’t noticed, I’m a bit stubborn.”

“Who, you?”

Her fingers are warm when they squeeze his bicep in half-hearted protest, and they linger there even as she takes another sip. “I’ve never...held a relationship for more than a year,” she admits, and he can tell where this game is heading - to margarita’s in and suddenly after months of dancing around this thing she’s got enough liquid courage to finally steer the conversation towards it. It’s a bad idea. But then, most things he’s done recently are.

He swallows half his drink in one go, and she quirks an eyebrow at him, surprised, maybe, and definitely curious. “High school sweetheart. I thought I was gonna marry her. She thought her lit professor senior year at Stanford was gonna leave his wife for her.”

She takes the information in with a curious gleam in her eye. 

\------

The fact that they don’t get shitfaced and make out on her floor is probably a good thing, but it doesn’t stop him from being disappointed as they dance around each other in the kitchen, tipsy and smiling as they do dishes together. When he tells her goodnight, she stares at him for a long moment in silence, and he’d be lying if he didn’t expect her to lean up on tiptoes and lay one on him. She doesn’t, curling her hand around his arm as she whispers a goodnight of her own, sliding past him down the hallway towards her bedroom. 

He drinks the last of the tequila and spends the wee hours of his morning watching that fucking interview again. 

_“There’s been a lot of talk about Claire Dearing in the news. A lot of people want answers from her about how she let this happen.”_

_“Listen, I get it. Thing like this happens, people want to see someone burn. You want to blame someone? You blame the idiots who decided to make a creature that was never meant to exist.”_

_“She was in charge of the park at the time. You understand how that looks.”_

_“Yeah, it looks like she ran an amusement park while some mad scientists spliced up genes on their bosses dollar. Anyone bother to ask InGen what they were doing at the time? Anyone bother to think about why Simon Masrani thought making a new dinosaur was the only thing left to generate some new buzz?”_

_“Simon Masrani died trying to destroy the creature. Some people say that makes him a hero.”_

_“Masrani was a good guy. But he cared more about entertaining visitors than keeping them safe.”_

_“And Ms. Dearing?”_

_“You’re looking for heroes and villains, here, but all you’re getting is people. Everything that happened was awful, and avoidable, but blaming Claire won’t get you answers, and it won’t get you closure. Claire Dearing saved my life. She saved a lot of other lives too.”_

\------

He opens a new bank account, shoves the interview money into savings, and doesn’t think about it for a month. Claire gets a job managing an accounting firm in Burbank, and Owen finds himself meeting Ian Malcolm for coffee three times a week. 

“You should write a book,” he tells Owen, and Owen almost always feels some animosity for this guy, but right then he definitely wants to punch him in his smug goddamn face. Theoretically, Owen knows that there are a lot of different ways to deal with trauma, but this guy - well. This guy has spent the last twenty years profiting off of it. “Or if writings not your style, I could see you going Irwin. Reality show, you know? See Owen Grady tame the wild beast. You’d have fangirls lining up to see you put your life in danger every week.”

“I honestly don’t know why I subject myself to you all the time. You have a face that’s just begging to be hit, and your pitch could use some work.”

“We have shared trauma. And I understand your lone wolf lifestyle.”

“We have zero in common and you’re still a decrepit old manwhore.”

“And you’re doing spectacular with the relationships in your life, I must say.”

Owen gives him the finger as he waves the waitress over for the check.

\------

His therapist tells him he’s becoming codependent, and Owen laughs. 

“Lady, I spent five years training dangerous pack animals who thought I was their alpha. This isn’t a recent development.”

Still. He goes home (and when the fuck did he start referring to it as home, anyway? If he had to wager a guess, he’s thinking probably five minutes after Claire offered up her guest room.) and he starts dinner and he thinks long and hard about what he plans to do with the rest of his life. After shoving his first wildly inappropriate response to the question aside, he has something of an identity crisis as he stirs tomato sauce on the stove and contemplates his existence. 

Claire gets home to find him researching reality shows on his laptop and the back door wide open, a burnt cake that used to be marinara soaking in the sink.

“What do you think of Taming The Wild Beast, With Owen Grady?” he asks, and she takes a deep breath. 

“Lets go out.”

“Yeah, sorry, I kinda burnt dinner.”

“That’s not what I meant.” She shuffles uncomfortably, her heel squeaking on the tile like she’s pressing all her weight into it.

“Well color me confused.”

“On a date.”

He shuts the laptop, turns to stare at her fully. He snaps his jaw shut when he realizes it’s hanging open. “What, like, now?” is the only thing he can think of, and she presses her lips into a thin line.

“Never mind. Forget I said anything.” 

“Woah, no no no. You just asked me out, we’re not letting that go without remark.” She huffs, annoyed, and her eyes flit to somewhere over his shoulder.

“You’re obviously not interested, so.”

“What the hell would make you think I wasn’t interested? Jesus, Claire, I practically live out of your pocket, I spend every spare second I can with you.” She pulls in a deep breath, blows it out through her nose, still avoiding eye contact. “You surprised me. I thought we were gonna dance around this for, like, at least a few more years.”

This earns him a small smile as her eyes flash to meet his. 

“Let me just change. I swear. Twenty minutes and I’m yours.” Twenty minutes, a million lifetimes, every day since he met her, probably. 

“Don’t bother. These heels are killing me and I hate this suit more than anything I’ve ever worn in my entire life, I’m starving, and all I want to do is take off my bra and eat an elephant.”

His eyes go wide as she slides down the hall, and if he spends half the night trying to figure out if she’s wearing a bra under her sweatshirt, she only has herself to blame.

\------

They never actually bother to make it official - he moves his clothes from the spare dresser to her massive walk in closet and his toothbrush finds a spot next to hers in the master bath, and when Gray’s birthday rolls around they fly out to Madison together. 

Gray latches on to his leg and doesn’t let go for a while, and Zach hovers awkwardly until Owen claps his shoulder with a manly grunt - then Zach is hugging him, too, and Claire’s sister is flipping shit off to the side because apparently she didn’t actually believe her when she said she was seeing the guy her boys haven’t stopped talking about. Claire smiles at him across the baggage claim and he turns his attention back to Gray, who has apparently done extensive research on the jobless community and has a lot of advice for how to get Owen back out in the world of working adults.

\------

When BioWare calls him about the game they want to develop, he hangs up on them.

They call him back, and he nearly laughs himself off the call a second time, but the assistant on the other line is persistent and apparently has extensive knowledge of his background. They want him to consult as an animal behaviorist. He schedules a meeting.

Six months later he’s staring at a paycheck with enough zeros to make him swallow uncomfortably, and when he asks Claire to marry him she shrugs, like it’s some forgone conclusion she reached a long time ago anyway. 

“What, not even a single happy tear? Maybe I don’t want to marry you at all.”

“Well, that’s disappointing. I had plans to do that thing you like. But if you’re not interested...”

If she decided one day she just wanted to drag him around by his dick he’d probably let her. He hopes he never pisses her off enough to give her the idea.

\------

Raptor Squadron comes out a month before the wedding day, and Ian Malcolm stares at him across the table as he sips on espresso like he’s some Italian connoisseur. He’s such a douchebag.

“Sellout,” Malcolm says, and Owen crosses his arms, rolls his eyes.

“Just following your fine example, doctor.”


End file.
